Synopses & Reviews
Philip Schultz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has been celebrated for his singular vision of the American immigrant experience and Jewish identity, his alternately fierce and tender portrayal of family life, and his rich and riotous evocation of city streets. His poems have found enthusiastic audiences among readers of Garrison Keillors Writers Almanac, Slate, The New Yorker, and other publications. His willingness to face down the demons of failure and loss, in his previous book particularly, make him a poet for our times, a poet who can write “If I have to believe in something / I believe in despair.” Yet he remains oddly undaunted: “sometimes, late at night / we, my happiness and I, reminisce / lifelong antagonists / enjoying each others company.”
The God of Loneliness, a major collection of Schultzs work, includes poems from his five books (Like Wings, Deep Within the Ravine, The Holy Worm of Praise, Living in the Past, Failure) and fourteen new poems. It is a volume to cherish, from “one of the least affected of American poets, and one of the fiercest” (Tony Hoagland), and it will be an essential addition to the history of American poetry.
Synopsis
This collection of poems by Jane Shore, one of America's most distinguished poets, traces the development of her career—from her first two award-winning volumes to a group of new poems that display her knack for discovering the uncanny in everyday experience.
Synopsis
That Said deftly traces Jane Shores career from her first two awarding-winning volumes,
Eye Level and
The Minute Hand, with their fascination for objects, to
Music Minus One, Happy Family, and
A Yes-or-No-Answer, which, taken together, fashion a memoir in verse about her childhood in Bergen, New Jersey, where she lived above her parents dress shop.
A group of new poems makes it clear that Shore is American poetrys most original inheritor of Marianne Moores and Elizabeth Bishops amazing knack for discovering the uncanny in everyday experience. The search for the source of authentic speech, especially as its found in the words of family and friends, has been at the heart of Jane Shores work from the beginning, and it has helped her to become, as Julia Alvarez writes, “without question, one of our best and most perceptive chroniclers of family life.”
Synopsis
“Jane Shore is the poet of little ambushes, moments that hold us hostage, moments when we come to life.” — Julia Alvarez
Since Robert Fitzgerald praised Eye Level, Jane Shores 1977 Juniper Prize-winning first collection, for its “cool but venturesome eye,” her work has continued to receive the highest accolades and attention from critics and fellow poets. That Said: New and Selected Poems extends Shores lifelong, vivid exploration of memory—her childhood in New Jersey, her Jewish heritage, her adult years in Vermont. Shores devotion to her familiar coterie of departed parents, aunts, uncles, and friends passionately subscribes to Sholem Aleichems dictum that “eternity resides in the past.”
United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin wrote, “Shores characters emerge with an etched clarity . . . She performs this summoning with a language of quiet directness, grace and exactness, clear and without affectations.” And while there is no “typical” Jane Shore poem, what unifies them is her bittersweet introspection, elegant restraint, provocative autobiography, and on every page a magnetic readability.
Synopsis
“Jane Shore's
That Said: New and Selected Poems represents the idiom of a recovery, a reconstituting of a personal past in a collective of fully realized, richly addressed moments, beautifully and indelibly spoken in its larger claims on the quotidian, ranging in insight from playing the good child-mother to "Thumbelina" to being the bad child to her own mother, calling her, "under my breath," "Mrs. Hitler." Shore's poem-narratives have long been praised for their juxtapositions of wit with quiet wisdom. Yet her poems of these past three and a half decades also speak through a Talmudic knowledge as ancient as the archetype. Her work is deep because its small worlds become so whole, exacting, and inclusive.” — Stanley Plumly
Synopsis
In her acclaimed collections Happy Family and Music Minus One, Jane Shore traced her life from childhood to coming of age to parenthood. Now, in A Yes-or-No Answer, Shore etches the persistence of the past in a life that has moved into a mature new phase as a member of the baby boom generation. Recalling her Jewish childhood in New Jersey, living in the apartment above the family's clothing store, Shore lovingly imagines her parents, now gone, reunited with relatives over a Scrabble board in the afterlife. The poet's teenage daughter sorts through the "vintage" clothes of her mother's own hippie days. Cherished items left behind -- an address book, a piano, an easy chair, a favorite doll -- continue to haunt the living.
The poems in A Yes-or-No Answer dignify memory through precise detail, with a voice that will resonate for a generation at a crossroads.
Synopsis
New and selected poems from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz.
About the Author
PHILIP SCHULTZ won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his most recent book of poems, Failure. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review, among other magazines. In addition, he is the founder and director of the Writers Studio in New York.
Table of Contents
New Poems Willow 3
Priorities 5
Fortune Cookies 7
Chatty Cathy 9
Danny Kaye at the Palace 12
My Fathers Shoe Trees 14
Last Words 16
Pickwick 18
Gratitude 20
A Reminder 22
American Girls 24
Mirror/Mirror 28
Gaslight 30
Staging Your House 32
Where to Find Us 34
Rainbow Weather 36
Eye Level (1977)
Witness 41
The Advent Calendar 42
A Letter Sent to Summer 46
Noon 48
Home Movies: 1949 49
Fortunes Pantoum 50
The Lifeguard 52
Sounding the Lake 53
Eye Level 56
The Minute Hand (1987)
A Clock 73
Pharaoh 76
Young Woman on the Flying Trapeze 78
The Russian Doll 81
Anthony 85
Thumbelina 87
High Holy Days 89
The Game of Jackstraws 92
Tender Acre 95
Wood 97
Persian Miniature 99
the Glass Slipper 101
Dresses 103
A Luna Moth 107
The Island 110
Music Minus One (1996)
Washing the Streets of Holland 115
Monday 118
Learning to Read 120
Best Friend 124
The Sunroom 126
The Holiday Season 129
The Slap 135
The House of Silver Blondes 138
Music Minus One 141
Meat 144
Workout 147
The Wrong End of the Telescope 150
Missing 155
Postpartum, Honolulu 157
The Bad Mother 159
The Sound of Sense 162
Holocaust Museum 164
The Lazy Susan 167
The Combination 171
Happy Family (1999)
Happy Family 177
Crazy Joey 180
Mrs. Hitler 182
The Uncanny 185
The Best-Dressed Girl in School 188
My Mothers Space Shoes 192
Evil Eye 196
Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium 198
Reprise 203
Shit Soup 206
My Mothers Mirror 208
Happiness 211
A Yes-or-No Answer (2008)
A Yes-or-No Answer 217
The Streak 219
My Mothers Chair 221
The Closet 224
Possession 226
Trouble Dolls 228
The Blue Address Book 230
Dummy 233
Shopping Urban 236
My Mothers Foot 238
Keys 240
Trick Candles 242
My Fathers Visits 244
Unforgettable 246
Dream City 250
Body and Soul 253
Gods Breath 256
On the Way Back from Goodwill 258
Fugue 260
Scrabble in Heaven 262
Gelato 264
Acknowledgments 267